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Rachel Notley getting used to glut of vitriol: Delacourt

From Kevin O'Leary to lousy spellers seeking a "kudatah," premier has faced a backlash by turns funny and disturbing.

Alberta Premier Rachel Notley was forced to set down ground rules for comments on her Facebook page that a male premier would not have had to enforce, one academic noted. (Dean Bennett / THE CANADIAN PRESS FILE PHOTO)

If that is true, then the brightest light in Canadian politics right now must be Alberta Premier Rachel Notley, drawing more than her share of wacky, over-the-top opponents this past week.

The newest one to come out from the woodwork is Kevin O’Leary, a finance guru and TV personality, formerly of CBC’s Dragons’ Den and the Lang and O’Leary Exchange.

Earlier this week, just before he started musing about a run for the federal Conservative leadership, O’Leary offered to invest $1 million in Canadian oil industries — but only if Notley resigned.

“The Alberta government is in free fall; there’s total chaos there,” O’Leary told Newstalk 1010. “It’s like a horror movie. It’s an unbelievable series of events.”

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Not content to say this once, O’Leary followed up with even more interviews, each one seemingly louder than the last. In his appearance on CBC’s Power and Politics on Tuesday night, O’Leary was yelling his demands as if shouting for help from the bottom of a well.

Perhaps it was a cry for help.

On Thursday, his old TV sparring partner, Amanda Lang, announced on Twitter that she was making it official: that O’Leary is “Canada’s Donald Trump.”

This wasn’t the only entertainment that Notley provoked this week, either. Also on Twitter, a person named “Maure Kyle” called for Notley to be overthrown in a “kudatah.”

You and I are probably more familiar with the French spelling: “coup d’état.” But one of Kyle’s supporters pointed out that he “spelled it in English.” The fun just carried on from there, with the #kudatah hashtag going viral.

By week’s end, of course, O’Leary and “kudatah” were being linked in countless jokes on social media. Maclean’s magazine’s Paul Wells claimed dibs on the headline: “Trump, O’Leary and the Permanent Kudatah.”

Before the days of Twitter or even the Internet, we used to have to wait for the mail to hear from the people that politicians were driving crazy. Often, these people would make their views known with handwritten, multiple-page letters, with writing all around the edges of the page and occasional illustrations. Nowadays, they can just dash off their rants in 140-character bursts. And this is why Twitter invented the “block” function.

All politicians stir up a certain level of frustration. Canada’s new prime minister, Justin Trudeau, told a Liberal convention a couple of years ago that he seemed to have the power to make Conservatives “nutty.”

Conservatives, for their part, were fond of accusing Stephen Harper’s critics of suffering from “Harper Derangement Syndrome” while he was in power.

Still, though it’s hard to measure antagonism, Notley seems to be stirring up a particularly vocal type, and not all of it is amusing.

In December, after Notley’s government brought in controversial farm-safety legislation, the level of vitriol aimed at her rose exponentially — prompting her Opposition counterpart, Wildrose Leader Brian Jean, to publicly call for respect and civility from Notley’s critics.

There were reports that police were investigating some of the online threats to Notley’s life and a University of Calgary professor said aloud what many would dare not to say — that the Alberta premier was being singled out because she is a female politician.

Melanee Thomas, an assistant professor of political science, noted that Notley’s office had been forced to set down ground rules for comments on her Facebook page that a male premier would not have had to enforce.

“It is exceptional,” Thomas said. “For a premier of the economic engine of the country to say not only, ‘Please be respectful,’ but ‘Stop using pornographic language.’ Like — which men in politics ever (have) to deal with that?”

I confess, I did wonder this week whether O’Leary would have been yelling as loudly as he was on TV if he was attacking a male premier. He has been an equal-opportunity bully in the past, most famously calling Pulitzer Prize-winning author Chris Hedges a “left-wing nutbar” in a 2011 broadcast of The Lang and O’Leary Exchange.

Notley, to her credit, hasn’t seemed too intimidated by O’Leary, firing back at him: “The last time a group of wealthy businessmen tried to tell Alberta voters how to vote, I ended up becoming premier.”

This must be the upside to getting more than one’s share of criticism from the bellicose, the belligerent and even the bad spellers — lots of practice in replying to them.

Notley’s growing experience, though, is a continuing case study in Canadian politics; a test of whether some voters are really ready for equality at the top levels of government. Fortunately, that time is quickly arriving, and it will take more than a “kudatah” to turn that progress around.

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